Challenges for state after devastating floods include concerns over mosquito-borne diseases and millions a day in costs as residents start to rebuild their lives.

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As southern Louisiana sheds the last of the weeks historic floodwater, the region faces significant challenges: how to handle resulting disease, how to pay for the damage and how to prevent it all from happening again.

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Many residents are only dimly aware, if at all, of those larger tableaux. Most remain focused on immediate matters like finding loved ones, burying pets and shoveling river silt from their living rooms.

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Or even more immediately, they search for food for themselves and their children in places where relief agencies have not yet arrived. Our daily bread, some people have taken to calling it.

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They took those brown bags with such gratitude, said Julie Ralph, who spent Thursday handing out lunches at Amite Baptist church in Denham Springs. The church itself was flooded and contaminated, so the food was prepared at the few dry homes in the area, then gathered at the church and distributed to anyone who could come. Several men with high-clearance trucks drove food to people who had no means of transportation. One lady broke down crying, Ralph said.

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The rivers and rainwater have receded, but the region is now haunted by small olive-drab patches of water here and there; puddled in a childs splash pool, trapped in a trash can, or cupped in fallen magnolia leaves. All of it will offer a breeding ground to mosquitoes in a region where they are, even in the best circumstances, a plague.

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Locals fear the Zika virus and mosquito repellents long ago disappeared from supermarket shelves. So far those fears may be unfounded. According to the Louisiana department of health, four new cases of Zika were reported this week, but all were contracted during travel to affected areas.

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Our surveillance activities include working with hospitals and other healthcare providers who notify us if and when a possible Zika case is diagnosed, said Frank Welch, who heads the states Zika response team. We also work with mosquito control agencies throughout the state who conduct mosquito testing in areas of known human cases to determine if mosquitos in those areas are carrying the virus.

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The bigger threat comes from the West Nile virus, which struck the area a decade ago after Hurricane Katrina. Doctors are warning residents to watch out for symptoms: fever, headache, stiffness of the neck, shakiness.

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Meanwhile state officials gathered at the capitol on Thursday to sort out how to pay for the emergency response, which costs the state millions of dollars per day, and will likely run into the hundreds of millions. The state was strapped for cash and considering a short-term loan before the storm, and lawmakers met to discuss moving ahead with it as soon as possible. Some of the costs will be absorbed by help from the federal government, which has declared 20 of the states 64 parishes to be major disaster sites. More than 60,000 people have registered for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).